About Me

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Two years after JFK fired CIA chief Allen Dulles, he was dead. Being a Deep State guy, Dulles set up an anti-Kennedy shadow government at his Georgetown home. NY Times, Washington Post, CBS, Newsweek were all under thumb of Allen Dulles. 2015 book, "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government"-Democracy Now, 10/19/2015

And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy
government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he
was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and
others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select
Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You
know, most Americans don’t know that that was the last official
statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not
the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the
investigation into John Kennedy’s assassination, and they did determine
he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.

and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas,
by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a
remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the
head of the CIA’s assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in
Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important
fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK
Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by
federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy
assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these
documents, including—and I used the Freedom of Information Act to try
and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They’re still holding
onto them.

DAVIDTALBOT:Allen Dulles’s thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out [Dulles was on the Warren Commission], I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek
wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping
shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles
was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thoughtit should
have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated itso much.
So, you know, it’s way too cozy, the relationship between Washington
power and the media. And—

Dulles-the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served
as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency
history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived....But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu....

ROCKEFELLER: Don't you understand the way Intelligence
works? Do you think that because I'm Chairman of the Intelligence
Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They
control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my
committee only gets, what they want to give me."" mp3]

(continuing): "As [author] Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and
explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: “Democracy
only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t
sit back and let democracy run itself.” Unsurprisingly, homilies like
this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far
greater power than most elected officials ever have. And while Dulles is
the star of The Devil’s Chessboard, he’s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast.

It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles’s most notorious
failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish mind
control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious “successes,” the
CIA’s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in
Guatemala in 1954. Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran
coup fairly glowed with joy: “It
was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a
sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is
doubtful whether any other can come up to it.” According to a
participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower,
Dulles’s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, “seemed to be
purring like a giant cat.”

But by this point these events are fairly well-known. Perhaps most
compelling is Talbot’s in-depth look at Dulles’s lesser-known yet still
extraordinarily sordid projects. As the Swiss director of the Office of
Strategic Services during World War II, Dulles — whose law firm had
represented German corporations and many U.S. corporations with German
interests — quietly attempted to undermine Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
demand that Germany surrender unconditionally, going so far as to order
the rescue of an SS general surrounded by Italian partisans. Dulles also
led the push to save Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi head of intelligence on the
Eastern Front and a genuine monster, from any post-war justice. Dulles
then made certain Gehlen and his spies received a cozy embrace from the
CIA, and helped push him to the top of West Germany’s Federal
Intelligence Service.

Also gruesome is the lurid story of how Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer
at Columbia University, was kidnapped in Manhattan by U.S. government
cutouts and delivered to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Trujillo then had Galindez, whose exposés of corruption Trujillo feared,
boiled alive and fed to sharks, and ordered the murder of the American
pilot who’d flown Galindez there. All under the beneficent gaze of CIA
Director Allen Dulles.

In a sense, however, all of The Devil’s Chessboard seems to
exist to set the stage for the final chapters about the assassinations
of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In the first 500 pages you are
convinced that Dulles would have had no moral qualms about killing any
politician, including Americans. You learnDulles had a lifetime of
experience in arranging assassinations, and apparent ties to attempts to
overthrow or murder French president Charles de Gaulle. And you
discover the depth of his grudge against John F. Kennedy, who dismissed
him and several of his key underlings after the Bay of Pigs
.But were JFK and possibly Robert Kennedy killed by conspiracies involving Dulles? That’s the conjecture of The Devil’s Chessboard. There’s
no question Talbot has pulled together a lot of suggestive old
information, and uncovered some that’s new. Furthermore,he certainly
proves there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of journalists
and politicians at the timeto pull on even the most obvious threads.
But 50 years later, I don’t think there’s any way to say much for sure
on this subject, except that it’s pretty interesting....In the end, whatever the reality of Talbot’s most sensational claims,
he unquestionably makes the case that...your darkest suspicions about how the world operates are likely an
underestimate.Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate
lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an
American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of
line.

They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts
in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their
fellow citizens.The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the
mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means
available to them. They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what
they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in
the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open,
discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t
go looking you will never hear a single word about it.

Moreover, it’s still right there in front of us today. Talbot recently argued,
“The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very
much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been
delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the
American security state to go much further than he went.”

Its failures,
such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it
is only the Deep State’s protectivenesstowards its higher-ranking
personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude.[2]...It is not too much
to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and
its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to
reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice...After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of
surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly
evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well....Deep State has been
extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion....Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure
to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human
and material capital, is slowly exhausted?"... "In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach,
the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That
said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not
so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is
relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures,
such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it
is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking
personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude. [2]How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I
equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years
specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security
clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing,
if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by
psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I
became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I
worked for, and only by slow degrees, sarting before the invasion of
Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that
motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis
called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the
views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to
Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating
biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then,
after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were
radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the
mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The
universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the
institutions they work for is always going to be a small one....

After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in
another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy....“You mean thenumber of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes....

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a
hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department
of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I
also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction
over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its
organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated
by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security
Council.Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State,
such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are
mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful
of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia
and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in
national security cases are conducted. The final government component
(and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government
established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting
of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of
the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally
so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the
Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words
from the State’s emissaries.

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008.
This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s
illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times
in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their
cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required
was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress
responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that
fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the
presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He
had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his
main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on
terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.

As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist
only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private
enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series
in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,”
Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized
Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the
September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with
top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared
civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the
country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the
Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for
top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction.
Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about
17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s
budget goes to paying contracts.

And the membrane between government and
industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper,
is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s
largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell,
is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99
percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the
political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly
setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly,
their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken
over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and
ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which
supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and
operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians
forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the
town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own
best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de
facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so
large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are
hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a
criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy,
perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement
officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial
for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much
to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and
its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to
reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried
government employee. [3]

The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden
highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period
since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence
Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the
traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations
of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR
(formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a
private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in
management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in
these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a
known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders
of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword.
Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]

After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of
surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly
evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well.
Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley
overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so
important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged.
While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies
to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important
an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo.
Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows
the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American
“jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a
service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he
could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison;
so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases.
The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully
cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon
Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of
every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising
that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its
own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s
assistance.Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon
Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in
and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and
consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the
frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional
and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely
above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the
paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data
mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-likecontrol
on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary
institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana
republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.

It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned and the
fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even
as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining
aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing
classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their
dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not....

The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread
that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and
deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic
social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the
headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to
Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening
sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome,
to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living
upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State has been
extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.

We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep
State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance,
firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost
impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires,
the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the
failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in
the future.Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly
propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed
for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred
by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya;
the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging
further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria.
Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure
to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human
and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is
strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves
in like manner.

But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed
to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless
collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president,
advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this
time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that
he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to
him by Vladimir Putin. [7]

Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison
and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the
claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The
unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance
have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as
Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically —
from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to
waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their
minds, it is possible that the Deep State’s decade-old tactic of crying “terrorism!”
every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same
Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly
even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.

The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the
day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as
appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed,
black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies
for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as
too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state
will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by
tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.

If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted
cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the
past....

The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it
is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is
based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through
FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously
breaking into technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public
relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy
concerns, it is difficult to take the tech firms’ libertarian
protestations about government compromise of their systems at face
value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their
own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is
accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business
from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain
privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more
compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even
legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech
firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight
government diktat.

This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama
announced revisions to the NSA’s data collection programs, including
withdrawing the agency’s custody of a domestic telephone record
database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to
spy on (undefined) “friendly foreign leaders.” Critics have denounced
the changes as a cosmetic public relations move,
but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud
that the president feels the political need to address it.

The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State,
based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate
hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may
only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a
way of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great
materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism
and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were
inevitable, the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep
economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those
currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance,
chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial
despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is
forever.

Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power
have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy,
reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating
that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique
good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change
are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the
Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works
splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing
unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be
thoroughly disappointing....